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Rethinking Smart Cities From the Ground Up

Tom Saunders and Peter Baeck

This short e-book highlights many of the issues that smart cities need to address and argues that the smart city movement should combine the best aspects of technology infrastructure while enabling greater collaboration between citizens and city governments. It encourages cheaper methods of tackling urban problems using internet based apps that involve citizens more: this is referred to as ‘smart cities 2.0’. After reading this and other smart city literature, I am convinced that we urgently need ‘smart city 3.0’, which would include the design and planning perspectives. This report results from an interesting, even surprising, collaboration between Intel China (a US high tech company normally associated with the expensive big data smart city), the independent not-forprofit company Cinnovate supported by the Chinese Government, UNDP China (who will be publishing the full set of case studies later) and Nesta, a UK innovation charity. The aim of the study is to inspire and guide smart cities in China, which is claimed as the site of most smart city experiments. India, which is promoting 100 smart cities, is probably neck-and-neck with China.

The authors highlight how smart cities have failed to deliver on their promise by promoting and finding uses for big expensive technology rather than using cheaper solutions to solve pressing problems for citizens. The report begins with a history of smart cities exposing the four flaws of the original smart city vision: starting with technology rather than urban challenges; insufficient use or generation of evidence; lack of awareness of how others are trying to improve cities; and little role for citizen engagement. It concludes with five policy recommendations for city governments that make this a really useful and essential read for all those involved in urban planning.

Case studies show how the smart city vision should recognise the role of behaviour and culture in the way that cities work. Investing in smart people and not just smart technology, harnessing collective intelligence, participatory planning, sharing cities, the collaborative economy, connected citizens and community groups, are all commendable initiatives, but design is not mentioned. The report stresses the real benefits of bottom-up interventions by unleashing a plethora of small tech initiatives which, given the failures of many major planning interventions, may be the most effective way to bring worthwhile improvements to existing cities. But how this fits with masterplanning, especially for major expansions and new communities, is not addressed, nor how these myriad tech interventions will potentially influence urban form, streets or the public realm. Masterplans are intended to be flexible and robust, capable of embracing unforeseen change, but the widespread adoption of smart city interventions could precipitate a cascading series of changes beyond the scale of anything envisaged. Technologists and social planners have the initiative, and the research funds, to set the agenda for smart cities and we need smart urban design to catch up.

URBAN DESIGN 140 Autumn 2016 Publication Urban Design Group

As featured in URBAN DESIGN 140 Autumn 2016

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Rethinking Smart Cities From the Ground Up Publication Urban Design Group
Publisher
Nesta
Published
2015
Reviewed By
Malcolm Moor, architect and independent consultant in urban design; co-editor of Urban Design Futures